Daylight Savings Time
Update
Looks like the journos have figured out the downside ... http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/08/08/daylight.saving.ap/index.html
The good news though: "Missiles won't be launching". I don't know how they expect the unscrupulous to make a profit out of something if reputable news media aren't going to scream hysterically about it for months in advance, in the style of The Great Y2K Fiasco. Ah, how fondly I recall the sweet satisfaction of waking up on January 1st 2000, having taken not a single precaution against the promised apocalypse, and finding everything working completely normally.
Anyway, this is a serious business in its own way: I recall being asked a few years ago to opine on a bid for a state system that was being converted to Oracle. The system defined funding for various state entities, and virtually the entire business logic was in effect defined by the state legislature. As such the funding model was vulnerable to change at any time, even retrospectively, and the only limit to the scope of change was the imagination of the state representatives and their advisors. For a fixed price contract and with existing staff already reeling from a series of recent changes it would have been a risk management nightmare. "Thumbs down" for that one.
Original Article
Heads-up people!
CNN are reporting on imminent changes to daylight savings time.
"House and Senate negotiators on an energy bill agreed to begin daylight-saving time three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and extend it by one week to the first Sunday in November.
...
Lawmakers said they hoped to complete the energy legislation next week."
I wonder how much bespoke code this is going to affect? I'm supposing that there will be some Oracle patches to deal with the required changes to TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE, etc.
Here's a search on the 10g documentation for "daylight savings time", by the way.
posted by David Aldridge @ 7:00 AM
3 Comments:
It is totally silly. I wished they will get rid of DST altogether as you can imagine the amount of wasted effort and time that has gone in twice every year in reseting clocks in appliances, etc.
Now, if it goes ahead, we will be on "normal time" for only 3 months of the year!
There's also this mania with putting clocks in stuff ... about the only electrical devices in the house that aren't blinking the (usually wrong) time at me are the fridge and the toaster. Even stuff that has no timing mechanism required has a clock ... the microwave for example, which I can't program to turn on at 3pm has a clock in it.
I got sick of it all and bought a watch that sets itself from the atomic clock radio signal from Fort Collins. Everything else is wrong.
Here in Brazil every year the DST begins and ends in different dates, and nothing blows up.
Last year´s the end date was antecipated one week to end before the elections (here we have a second voting if no candidate gets 50% in the first) and it would be hard to set up the eletronic booths if the hour changed.
But, except for the almost 1 million of booths, nobody complains about DST in computing... but it would help a lot if was fixed, and a bit longer.
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